Business Flexibility: The Need of the Hour

Posted on January 22, 2020 by Jonathan Kidd

Businesses today are increasingly adopting an unstructured approach towards their processes and often rely on collaboration to drive results. While solutions have been devised to handle repetitive tasks, the need of the hour is for solutions that enable business flexibility.

In this blog, we take you through three reasons why your BPM will need to adapt to enable businesses to take a more flexible outlook to their processes. 

Enable smart collaboration

The need for collaboration cannot be underestimated. Collaboration between teams plays a crucial role in ensuring that processes deliver the result. In a structured approach, certain tasks or steps may be assigned to individuals for inputs, approvals, or to handle escalations. In an unstructured approach, however, finding the right person may prove difficult given that teams are often tasked with identifying individuals to collaborate with and often end up picking up people who may be available but do not possess the required level of subject matter expertise.

The solution, therefore, is for collaborators to identify teams rather than individuals that can be assigned to steps within the process. Not only does this address specific needs at the service request level but ensures effective resolution with minimal time delay. In addition to creating a culture of self-organised teams, team-based job allocation also ensures that team members do not wait for instructions from their managers on task assignments.

Avoiding bottlenecks

With an unstructured and largely manual process, bottlenecks are a real concern. In businesses, bottlenecks can be caused due to numerous reasons ranging from a spike in demand, procedural inefficiencies and can often result in missing deadlines and pressure-related errors. Bottlenecks also have an adverse impact on cost and time taken to close a service request.

The need of the hour to tackle this is for a platform that not only identifies bottlenecks but helps find ways to work around them. With a Kanban-inspired smartboard, it becomes easy for managers to identify bottlenecks by monitoring the number of tasks currently under the “to do” column. They can then enforce SLAs to ensure critical tasks and those that have been in the queue for a long duration have been given priority.

Alternative paths

Not everything goes according to plan and sometimes tasks that have been done do not meet objectives or are found to lack quality. Addressing these issues is critical and a failure to do so can result in unsatisfactory customer experience. Moreover, it can cause bottlenecks in the process.

In an unstructured process, there is no way to identify exactly at which instance the error happened whereas in a structured process it becomes easy to identify errors. Utilising a solution that provides alternative paths to take corrective action will help improve service quality and more stringent control over processes.

Boombirds is a comprehensive solution that has helped several enterprises adopt a more flexible approach to business processes. To learn more about how you can use our intuitive platform to transform your business processes, improve efficiency, and drive business growth, click here.